my weekly planner looks like shit
by Elias Sorich
monday
The sun rises and I can’t see it, the wind disturbs something and it moves, the mourning doves are making involuntary sounds with their thick feathers. The firmament goes from one Monday to the next without bothering to mention it. The firmament and I are at odds. The firmament and Us have beef with each other. As I spilled coffee down my hairy shin I thought Ow. Us are patiently awaiting the hour when light will snap through the window. We decide to make the journey from one cushion to the other cushion. The assembly humbly puts forth the motion to take the 7th pee break of the day. It’s those two mourning doves again playing their game of cat and mouse. I looked at my handwriting from across these Seven Long Days and it Did seem As If I was undergoing Shifts.
tuesday
The position I’m applying for is the one you’re offering! I’m qualified for the position. I’ve been spending my time recently doing things that would make an outside observer say: hey, wow, find something else to do! Just now I took my third shit of the day and outside it is a lovely one—I wrote down: “the air had the definite feeling of fall as I stepped outside around 9” and now I’ve done it twice. My experience as a Full Time Shithead was built off of the minimal praise I received in elementary school. I believe I can apply the many hours I’ve spent on the blue couch feeling worthless to the workplace with great efficacy. The only thing I’ve felt invested in of late is my garden of herbs that sway toward the sunlight.
wednesday
Someone sits you down during the startling blue of your midday and presents you with a choice to make and three options. In your head you’re thinking that this is bullshit and externally you’re uninvested yet overwhelmed. Do you choose, a) the option that’s “easy and good” yet unfortunately makes you doubt whether or not you’re actually an “easy and good” person, b) choose the “obviously bad and wrong option” that you would never pick in real life but that will distinguish you from your peers, or c) the “neutral egg salad” option which is how you’re feeling and you know constitutes cowardice, a lack of zhuzh, an overall alarming level of disengagement. Whichever you choose, your midday is waiting for you, maw open tongue waggling, just eager to get you back where you belong: without aim, looking at clouds and being alienated from them, both hating and loving how blue the sky is, torn between being and absolute terror.
thursday
You (as I) stand up for the tenth time this morning and wonder briefly about things you prefer to think briefly about. You suffer from a lack of will power. Or an excess of enjoyment. Each day no matter how surely it marches toward winter is unspeakable. What was the thing you said about yesterdays? There’s always yesterday? No—seize the yesterday? It was: you know what they say: no matter what, yesterday the sun will rise. I imagine a great white piece of paper on the floor. I imagine getting naked and lying facedown. I imagine that after 2-3 hours I will have shed. I will have left behind a shape of myself, an elias print. Hungry foragers will then know that I am edible and not in the least bit poisonous. Foodbag, boys! They will call out. Rather than accomplish this or that aim, I would allow the soft teeth of experience-hunters to seek novelty in my mallow. Ergo my mood today is best described as mycelial. My mushroom book says, “[I] recognize only two kinds of [people], the ‘pickers’ and the ‘kickers’ (those that deserve to be picked, and those that deserve to be kicked!).” I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle, but can’t decide if it’s kicked and then picked, or picked and then kicked.
friday
this garden has one primary rule to it. don’t think about things like life and death. sweep the concrete of dust. splash some water over the bird shit and sweep it away. water the plants for no other reason than that it’s something to do with your hands. it’s not about giving life. look at how the plants are growing. the mint spreading roots. note it meticulously in your garden notebook. again, this is not about life and death. these are just things that you’re doing every day. take joy in the bumble bees gathering pollen on the flowers you’ve planted. pick autumn leaves off the mulch you’ve laid down. move in and out of sunlight according to the hour. wipe the table of dirt and leaves and bird shit. clean up the bird shit. pick up the dead leaves. clean off the dirt. water the plants. watch the bugs. write it down. do this every day. this is not about life or death. this is just about doing something today. with no thought about what you might be doing tomorrow. this is about the fact that there is no tomorrow right now and the plants you watch and the sweeping you’re doing and the common birds that are flying in and out of your garden eating and pecking at each other and going and coming back and singing. this isn’t about life or death or who’s living and who’s dying and which one of those you are. whichever one it doesn’t change that there are bugs doing their glinting in your garden.
saturday
i stepped in the ground nest of a wasp swarm at sammy’s house whose father snorted cocaine at his birthday party and who owned a green buggy. i was covered in welts and sammy’s mother put this balm on me that was white and grainy and had a peppermint smell. the greeks had a belief that being stung on the lip by a honeybee gave the gift of poetry. there’s a connection there. mother nature wanted me to hate myself. there’s nothing else i could even think about besides poetry. by which i mean i’m not one of those people that contributes to society. i’m one of those people who lays around trying to piece together his small reality. remember the smell of pine needles at sammy zimmerman’s house and his bowl cut and brown hair? remember the wasps swarming my small and barely human body? i’m one of those people that thinks maybe some of this is owed to that. like maybe the poison has lingered under the skin like mercury. pathetic. sammy and i sat together on the mesh hammock outside his house. he was a sweet boy and summer smelled like dry lightning. i love people, i really do. i’m one of those humans who just doesn’t quite get it. who’s so close to relaxing into it. but physical reality and i have this thing where i’m feeling like it should be different and it is never going to change for me not ever.
sunday
glass ecosystem moves back and forth. mourning doves over and over. you get sick of their brilliant necks and bizarre sounds. simple feathered engines, so idiotic and possessing such incredible mysteries. down below the shouting neighbor. we took his cat from him. he left it behind a dryer for two days. if he wasn’t angry about that, what does he yell about day after day. over my backyard i placed a thin layer like a blanket or the eyes of a camera and now the light is dispersed and gray forever. he goes on and on. his apartment has no windows. what could possibly be so distressing? there isn’t anything beyond the wooden fence of the backyard after all. the phonecalls are just pranks the birds pull on us to keep us entertained. sometimes i imagine i see the sunset and it’s so beautiful. the yellow-blue color, it’s the feeling that anything exists. it’s that wow factor that comes with things existing. to tell the truth i know something about him. he told me he used to own a bodega and it failed. but why should that matter anymore? what we’re seeing right now is the only thing that isn’t imagined. there aren’t any bodegas. no money to lose, no father to disappoint, no mother. there’s just this backyard and the birdfeeder and the sky which indicates no time only the fact of existence and is often beautiful.
Elias Sorich hails from Woodstock, NY. He has an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University, and his poems have been published in Thin Air Magazine and Rock & Sling. In summer 2019 he was the co-recipient of an artist residency at Rabbit Island during which he wrote about isolation and insect biomass decline. These days, he tends a small backyard garden, takes care of a kitten, and remotely teaches creative writing to high schoolers and undergrads.
